Licensing in a Hosted Model
One of the most important things to understand when you are considering the hosted model is the way licensing works. In the hosted world, you don't buy any licenses, instead, you rent them, or subscribe. In the traditional on-premise world a user license is referred to as a Client Access License (CAL). In the hosted world a license is referred to as a Subscriber Access License (SAL).
The first thing to understand about a SAL and the hosted model is precisely what licenses you are paying for. This is an important factor to getting more value from the hosted licensing model. Usually the product or service you are consuming will not define the specific SAL's you are paying for. For example, when we host Microsoft Dynamics CRM for a company or a user, on our invoice we simply show hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As a hosting company, behind the scenes we are reporting for three different licenses in order to provide you with a
hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM service. Those three license are; Windows, SQL, and CRM.
Why should you care about this? Well, if you are only interested in a single service, such as hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it doesn't really make any difference. However, if you need additional services, like Exchange, SharePoint, or OCS, then it can make a big difference, one that will save you money. This is because many of the services that you are looking to subscribe to share some of the same licenses. And, you only need to pay for one license one time. If you take a look at what a Microsoft hosing partner reports back to Microsoft for a hosted Exchange user, there are two licenses; Windows and Exchange. If you are already consuming the hosted Microsoft CRM service, you are already paying for the Windows SAL. So, to add Exchange we would only need to charge you for the additional Exchange SAL. This is a significant savings and the more services you consume from the same hosting company, the more value you will get from the SAL model.
Secondly, make sure you understand everything that is included in the SAL. For example, most people don't know that a SAL includes software assurance (SA). In the traditional on-premise world SA is something that you must add to the purchase of the license. It usually runs about 20% of the cost of the software annually. A SAL also includes certain client side software applications. The most common example of this is when you consume hosted Exchange; you are eligible for a free copy of the latest version of Outlook. The beauty of all this is that you don't have to worry about anything on the licensing side as it is handled by the hosting company and the SAL model.
Now that you have a little background on licensing in the hosted model and what a SAL is, let's take a closer look at the hosted applications we focus on.
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